OK, player haters, you might expect a post like this from Zero, but I had to give you my thoughts on the new Amazon Kindle, the latest foray into the eBook device space. This is no conspiracy: it’s fact. The book is dead.
Remember the first MP3 players? Like pre-iPod? I owned these pieces of crap. Stretch your mind further back to the days of pre-Palm organizers (Newton anyone?). People scoffed. “Graffiti–WTF?” or “dude I’ll never ditch my vinyl”.
Cue the lights and orchestra swell. A few years later, Tower Records shuts its doors and the death of the physical recording is official. When’s the last time you bought a paper calendar? OK, maybe you rilly rilly love golden retriever puppies and hang a calendar in your cube, but you aren’t adding your Evites to it.
Well, the love has now come to books, that last bastion of physical fetishization. Jerry Seinfeld once explained in an episode of his eponymous show that he had no reason to save books on his shelves after he’d read them to a befuddled George bent on retrieving tomes from an ex. This gag won’t obtain in a couple of years. Hording books–actual, physical books–will seem as ridiculous as that CD tree rotting in your basement.
Are you ready? Here comes the science: books suck. Sure, there’s comfort in the physical page, thumbing through, smelling the ink, cracking the bindings. But have you ever carried a backpack full of physics books across the quad? Worse, art history?! Those mothers are huge. College students are lazy. Textbooks are expensive to boot. Enter the eBook reader. Lay this on the kids today, with their hair and their clothes, and you’ve got the iPod & Text Msg Generation as early adopters. Hell, give them the readers for free.
Book publishing, if it’s done right, will only benefit from this. Rather than shipping books here, there and everywhere, make the prosumer do the work. Won’t happen? iTunes, have you heard of it? If I were Borders or Barnes & Noble, I’d be thinking about a hell of a lot more than adding another espresso machine to the Café.
Plus, just think of the pirating possibilities. You can already get every other kind of media this way. What makes books privileged?
It’s going to happen. It may not be with the Kindle, but don’t think Amazon isn’t talking about burning books here. It’s not exactly subtle.
Time to ignite.
Tags for this post: amazon, ebook, ebook device, ebook reader, fake steve jobs, golden retriever puppies, jerry seinfeld, kindle, player haters, prosumer tower records
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November 21st, 2007 at 5:55 am |
Much as I love paper books, this is very likely to be the way of things to come… Just like VHS, Betamax, vinyl, audiotape, CD’s and now even DVD’s and Games - books will join that list. Perhaps more slowly, but certainly Education seems an almost obvious sector to start.
November 21st, 2007 at 7:24 pm |
Imagine how minimalist our homes are gonna look in a few years, all our entertainment will be digitally transferred onto devises I hope will have long shelf lives.
My collection of music, movies, games, books will be a playlist on a few devices. No more space dedicated to useless packaged disks, but there will always be space for my books, especially ones with pictures, my favorite kind.
February 13th, 2008 at 2:59 pm |
I noticed a lot of books only come in the Kindle version now. You will be forced to buy one of these if you want to read certain books.
July 10th, 2008 at 3:46 pm |
I’m very late to the party with this comment, but I think it is a relevant point to consider.
One of the developing issues we have in the information age is the inability to focus. If every book you ever wanted is available all the time, will you be tempted to skip around the same way we surf the web? Will you actually be able to read one story all the way through or will you channel surf ‘books’ as well?
Recent research has shown that the Internet is changing the way we think and the structure of our brains (and I’m sure books, movies, and television all did as well.) This will bring benefits, but also disadvantages.
I love my ebooks, computers, and the Internet. And I have wasted hours of my life ‘popping online’ to check something, noticing something else, following a meandering trail of interesting stuff, and completely failing to accomplish what I set out to do (even if I am capable of remembering what that was!)
It seems my short and long term memory are now heavily dependant on technology because I can’t even remember my own phone number.